- - - "When I hear what we call music, it seems to me that someone is talking, and talking about his feelings or about his ideas of relationships,
but when i hear traffic, the sound of traffic, here on 6th avenue for instance, i don't have the feeling that anyone is talking, i have the feeling that... sound is acting.
And i love the activity of sound. What it does is it gets louder and quieter, and it gets higher and lower, and it gets longer and shorter. It does all those things which I'm completely satisfied with that, I don't need sound to talk to me.

- - - People expect listening to be more than listening, and so sometimes they speak of inner listening or the meaning of sound, when I talk about music, it finally comes to peoples minds that I'm talking about sound, that doesn't mean anything. That is not inner but is just outer, and they say, these people who understand that finally say, "you mean its just sounds?", thinking that for something to just be a sound, is to be useless, but whereas i love sounds just as they are. And i have no need for them to be anything more than what they are, I don't need them to be psychological, I don't want a sound to pretend that its a bucket or that it's president or that it's in love with a another sound. I just want it to be a sound.

And I'm not that stupid either, there was a German philosopher who is very well known, Immanuel Kant, and he said that there are two things that don't have to mean anything:
One is music and the other is laughter... don't have to mean anything , that is , in order to give us very deep pleasure" - - -

I'm sure a few ppl invented the silent SID technique, I did as well 20 years ago. I played a 3bit digi in the luma values, except connected the luma pin to an audio amplifier. Worked great except for the loud from the vertical sync signal. Obviously could hear it leaking in the monitor as well.
I also invented the waveform digi independantly. Did a lot of work with Nate Danneburg. This was convered in C=Hacking I believe. I used the SID filter as well, but went even further with envelopes and real wavetable instruments. Should be quite easy to make a great sounding weavesynth with realtime MIDI.
Did more stuff with the serial port of CIA, that can be used for stereo digi as well.
Used the paddle with 8x slowed down music for a sampler.
I can't tell you how many other experiments I've done.
Anyhow way cool demo! Very fast mixer. I've worked on exactly the same problem, helping Nate with his Modplayer 128. Good job!

@FatFrost I don't know? Perhaps when it's finished! The interest in it is generally low and only a few people from the beta team created something original with it. I don't want to see csdb flooded with simple Amiga module conversions. The real power of the converter is the mixture of sid and samples and that it sounds good with all sid revisions. If you want to join the beta team, just leave me a message and I'll have a look.

Is the turn disk part working ok? I only hear a strange sample, sounds a bit like SAM/Receiter, but it is very garbled. More like a "Heh hmpf heeey hm". Then the scroll: "Yeah you heard him, Flip Disk", etc. - sounds as if the original intention was to have someone say "Turn disk" or something?

Richard claims to have produced sound on a Sinclair ZX81 (a machine with no sound hardware) at the age of 11:

When I was 11, I won 50 pounds in a competition for writing this program that made sound on a ZX81. You couldn't make sound on a ZX81, but I played around with machine code and found some codes that retuned the TV signal so that it made this really weird noise when you turned the volume up.
By displaying patterns that induced excessive sidebands in the video signal, the lower sideband was forced to spill over into the audio portion of the TV signal's spectrum. While the ZX81 was designed to filter the lower sideband of the video signal out, its simple circuitry did not remove all of it, and James' software was supposedly able to overcome the filtering.

Regarding the part that plays sampled data via the VIC border colour register... it isn't actually anything new. I have an old tape recorder program which does a poor attempt of playing the recorded sample data this way. Still, this is an excellent version of the technique.

Also, on real C64 you can actually hear the SID oscillator doing the sound processing if you have set the frequency and waveform registers but have the volume control off. Maybe this can actually be combined with the $d020 sample playing technique? In other words, a "silent" way of playing SID with samples, which requires you to boost the TV volume to maximum :)

Yes, the choice of the music... everything was done in a hurry and none of our musicians had time to do something for the demo so we had to improvise a little. Most Amiga modules won't fit into the memory of the C64 and my routine doesn't support any musical effect commands. So it's not so easy to find a good one so I took some very old ones which had great impact on me when I was a lot younger.

I've always loved samples on the c64 and this release just blasted me away and sent shivers down my spine! Last time i got this surprised was the first time i heard a pollytracker module, and before that.. hmm.. that thing by soundemon the other year, and before that, cycleburners stuff. I am with rambones, this is a milestone release. Love the gfx by good old Decoy Design too. Only thing I wasnt quite up with was the choice of music, but thats another story. I cant wait for Vicious Sid 2 to be released! (:

@burglar Thx for releasing the mp3 versions of the songs. So I could hear the sound without sid part for the first time. The monitor of my SX 64 is too small to produce the sound loud enough to hear. By the way you can't compare ModPlay or Pollytracker with my routine. I've got a real nmi based replayer and so I can mix screen display and or sid sound at the same time. Did you ever try ModPlay? Then you know how it sounds :)

This is so cool! Me and Rockon just couldn't work after looking/listening to this during morningbreak. This is in many aspects as revolutionary as ThinkTwice, 1001 Escos, Deus ex Machina, EoD and the likes! Much respect and looking forward to see this technique in the hands of some top-kick ass musicians on the scene...

Wow, the first amiga mod part, blew me away. Sounded just like my old 8 bit soundblaster, listening to amiga mods! (never had the luxury of owning an amiga). Sounds just great! Sadly, being in NTSC land, I doubt it would work great on my actual machine, so I was forced to listen in emu. The rest had the typical lowfi c64 digi sound to it, seeing as the first part certainly did not, i was a little surprised at that. (That being said, EMU is by far in no way a fair judgement! I should transfer to see if it plays in NTSC or attempt a fix before commenting on quality..)

Obviously the $d020/$d021 "noise" part did not work on my emu, but what a great idea! That I should like to hear on my real thing... (for those curious as I, change location E1B0 to STA $d418 and you can at least make out the sample)

Incredible work here. Great little production (Beautiful graphics). X2008: Revolution.

User CommentSubmitted by assiduous on 30 October 2008

>sampleplayers too advanced for any emu

not for Hoxs64. the analogue noise in the part4 can be heard only on a C64 though.

a great demo,i was actually quite confused listening to Mixer`s samples live at the radio broad cast. i was like "wat ? are they airing an mp3 remix for a break ?". Soundemon deserves a huge respect for his efforts to find and exploit the new Sid effects,way to go man!

I did not expect this to be here yet as there is a fix to last part making it less snappy. Snap is due to bad adsr data. Was too tired to fix it before X. Once Soundemon is back we'll see if we release a fixed version.

Yes, this is very good. I love the design too. More of this will make us all happy.
It's weird, this past year the scene has been like it was in 1992. I am very happy as in 1992 they claimed the 64 was dead. How wrong they were, now i think Conic can come back to the scene too. ;)

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